Best partnership: Cooke and Minichiello

In August last year, Gillian Cooke logged in to her Facebook account to find a message from a stranger. It was Nicola Minichiello, Britain's top female bobsleigh driver, wanting to know if Cooke, a former Commonwealth long jumper, might be interested in switching sports. "I sat on it for a day or two," says Cooke (below left, with Minichiello) "then thought, why not?"

Sheffield-born Minichiello had switched sports herself in 2001, from the heptathlon (she was formerly married to Tony, Jessica Ennis's coach), and won world championship silver as a driver in the two-woman bobsleigh in 2005. Now she needed a new brakewoman, and identified Cooke as one of the dozen or so athletes with transferable skills. In February, after some crash-course training that was done mostly on an iceless tarmac track in Bath, the pair were tucked in to a cart together, hurtling at 90mph down the world championship track at Lake Placid. They won gold, just six months after first meeting.

"Gill was new to the sport," says Minichiello, currently leading the team's preparations for next year's Winter Olympics in Vancouver, "but we had faith we were as great as anybody on the day, and that we could be the best in the world." And they were, despite Cooke's admission that, tucked away in the back of the sled, she had little idea what was going on. "It was all Nicola. Looking at the footage, I can see myself making all kinds of mistakes. We're going to be much stronger this year – and I'll know where I am on the track." TLa